ITNESS

featuring Madora Frey, Nicola Ginzel
Heide Hatry, Seren Morey, and Fawn Krieger

Trestle Gallery, 168 Seventh Street 3rd Fl, Brooklyn

May 23 - July 2, 2014

ITNESS explores the artwork as a source of mystery rather than beauty, as source for questions and quandaries surrounding how we approach an object, image, or event that has been cultivated for the distinct purpose of expanding our relationship with the world, with its myriad forms and their related meanings.
 
Since the beginning of the 20th century, and the revolutionary aims that accompanied many of its initial movements, such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, it has become nearly impossible to remain ignorant that the concept of Beauty was ready to be transformed. The most radical of these was simply to stop using the word 'Beauty' completely. Do not say Beautiful. Just say "this is this" and present the object, the image, or the event as a self-justified vessel for meaning. Each of these presents an experience loaded with attendant meaning.
 

Art is one part invention and one part artifact. The ‘invention’ part suggests a degree of industry, a working toward the creation of something new, while the artifact part suggests a mining in the recesses of knowledge or imagination, of discovering something once lost. The word itself is suggestively vague and incomplete, and seems like part of a larger and more complex definition. Its specious incompleteness hints at aspects yet unassigned. It pushes us toward something new.

The 'it' of the title refers to a quality, sometimes discovered and often invented, that characterizes an event in which we see something new for the first time. Sometimes new territories are not beyond the outer boundaries of our experience, but are to be found in a different way of looking at what we already know. Take the most commonplace of objects, or a gesture, or the idea of a way of doing something, and turn it just slightly, so that it resembles a version that you would not have imagined, and the world is reversed in all values. Beauty ceases to be the appreciation of a socially demarcated appearance and becomes instead the smile on your face when a new fact enters the world.